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From Math Images

Sorry I missed your call this afternoon. And apologies for not
replying more promptly, my parents are in town this week.

Yes, I'm looking forward to the project for next summer. I will be
looking to recruit a student from one of my classes this next year,
freshmen from my data structures class or juniors/seniors from my
visualization or graphics classes.

As for funding for one of the students, there are 2 obvious places I
can go. There are RPI funds for summer undergraduate stipends
http://undergrad.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=115, (about $4000 for
the summer I believe), but it is a competitive program, so not
guaranteed. Another source would be the Rensselear Center for Open
Source Software http://rcos.rpi.edu/, and as long as a portion of the
work can be released as open-source software (there are no
restrictions on topic), that funding should be easy to secure.

Is there anything specific you are looking for from me now?

Barb

--

Hi Gene-

Sorry for the delay! I understand the timing problem. For the first
summer I can probably do something smaller and probably find funds
somewhere else. 2-3 students per summer sounds good. And depending
on the student, and how many weeks they work 4.5-6K each. RPI does
not charge overhead on undergraduate salary, which is nice. I hope
that's specific enough for now.

Penny:

Why don't you preserve funding for one set of internships for me? I'll either use it summer '11 or in conjuntion with my fall '11 course. One wildcard here is that I don't yet know for certain whether I will be teaching the vis course in fall '11 (we don't schedule quite that far ahead). It would be nice to have the flexibility to go either way.

To be specific, this would be cutting my budget in half.

Does that work?

Penny

On 7/28/10 2:41 PM, Gene Klotz wrote:
Sorry to be unclear:
What would you like to do given the time constraints? Have your Fall '11 course and the Summer '11 funding, or also Summer '12 funding, or what?

Basically, we need to know how much will be leftover, so we need to know when you'll be involved and whether using students or not?

Thanks, Gene

Hey Gene,

My idea was to have students working on AY internships in parallel to the course (or maybe extending projects after it concluded). Stipends were to cover non-course parts of activities. I don't need any money to include this project as part of the course. I'm still a bit undecided about whether to emphasize summer or AY.

I think there's real value to having more groups involved. If you want to cut my involvement to one summer and/or fall, that would be fine.

Penny

On 7/28/10 10:18 AM, Gene Klotz wrote:
Hi Penny,

Good to clarify where you're at and delighted you're game to participate!

It would be great with us if you had courses fall '11 and '12--we want very much to see how these activities payday loans work in courses. However, in addition to your stipend we do have you down for $3,750 each for 3 students each summer. While you'll maybe want some funds for a student assistant for each course, it probably ain't appropriate to pay students in courses for doing this. If you don't need ALL the money, we'd like to shift it over to fund one group we'll otherwise have to cut out--the 1/4 financial reduction has been a real killer!

I'm still game to participate. When we talked earlier, though, we talked about having UMBC teams active during the academic year, rather than the summer, presumably fall 11 and 12. I'm hoping to teach my Vis course in fall 11 and this would allow me to leverage the project in that course. I do see the appeal of summer internships, though, especially for younger students. I'm thinking, in particular, of some of my CWIT scholars. Is this something we need to settle immediately?

Andy:

I'm still interested in being involved in the project. My idea had been to
have students generate images using the complex function grapher I
published in JOMA a few years back. We regularly have students create
images (sometimes required and sometimes for extra credit) in
undergraduate service courses including College Algebra and Differential
Equations. We can ask students in one or both of those classes to create
math image pages featuring the images they created. Last December or
January I sent a collection of some of the images created by the College
Algebra students. Since Differential Equations is a required class for the
Math Education majors, working in that class would let us get at
preservice teachers, though I suspect IRB would require us to let everyone
get the extra credit for preparing a math image page and not restrict
things solely to preservice teachers. We would need support for a graduate
student (or students) to help the undergraduates with how to write things
up appropriately.

One change is that I have been moved to a 12-month contract, which means I
can no longer accept consulting income from a grant at another school
without a lot of paperwork and approvals (which may or may not be
forthcoming). Between the short timeline and the fact that people are on
vacation, I certainly can't commit to anything right now. I am interested
in working with the project and would be willing to contribute some of my
time to supervise the graduate students if we listed the $10,000 as
graduate student support. If you feel you need to have someone who is a
paid Ph.D. at KSU, then perhaps we can take some of this money as support
for a post-doc who works under my direction (I have two post-docs
currently).

I hope this is sufficient for you. I am willing to consider modifications
of the proposal if appropriate.

Cammie:

I look forward to conducting the summer
Math Images workshops at Sweet Briar if they get funded. I don't
currently have additional related plans--it was all I could do to
survive my first year of full-time teaching this past year!--but I
will let you know if I undertake anything else connected to the
project...

We have you down for doing a summer workshop for summers of 2011 and 2012,
and will pay for 3 students and have an honorarium for you. Have you any
related plans, such as doing some work on Math Images in some courses?